Youns still have snow on the ground ?
Still? At this time of year, it's just getting started. We got hit by that blizzard just after Christmas, and have had more snow since then, so we've got about 8" on the ground. I'm new to Pittsburgh, but I'm told it's more snow than is typical for this time of year. It hasn't been very cold yet. But, this is neither hear nor there; it will be a few months before the tree comes down.
Wood duck, that's a good point about the difference between yard and forest trees. I guess my ratio idea isn't likely to be useful; oh, well.
My house is on a fairly steep hillside, without a lot of level areas for wood racks. When I got started back in late September, I built racks to hold a cord and a half on the concrete patio outside the walkout basement. Those got filled with a load I purchased with the intention of burning it this winter, but it arrived at 40% MC (or worse), which I didn't realize until it was too late. So then I bought another 3/4 cord from a different seller, and stacked that on the first floor deck that's over the patio.
The initial bad experience and unexpected expense made scrounging my own wood look more appealing, so I set up a smartphone app to notify me of Craigslist ads for free firewood. Few homeowners seem to have any idea what sort of trees they're trying to get rid of. The first "oak" tree I went after turned out to be a red elm. The next oak was a mulberry. Then came some pine that was actually an overgrown juniper bush. I helped clean up an unwanted woodpile at a burnt-out and formerly abandoned house that was being gutted and rehabbed, and came home with some more mulberry and the trunk of a red oak that someone had left standing after cutting off the top. By this point the deck above the patio was getting crowded, but it didn't matter too much because the weather was chilly and we weren't using the deck much anyhow. But free wood offers kept popping up on my iPod, and soon I was ferrying load after load of black locust from a house in a neighboring suburb, 3 miles away. To a spy satellite I'd look like an ant dragging bug carcases across the landscape back to my burrow. Thankfully I live near the bottom of a valley while the source of the locust was close to the top of a ridge, so the trips home with the locust were mostly controlled descents; my poor Volvo isn't built to haul that much weight uphill.
At this point the perimeter of the deck is lined with wood stacked to the top of the railing, much of which I will have to move somewhere else when spring weather makes the deck more attractive as a living area. And now this lovely and conveniently positioned oak tree comes along. I'm sure I can find room for some of it, but I suspect there's more than I can take without alienating my wife and neighbors. I think I'm going to need to have some simple way of telling the tree service what parts of the oak to take away, and what to leave behind. I don't want to create a situation where the homeowners' yard is full of wood that I can't deal with quickly.
